It's hard to know if the town you grew up in was something special, or if you just remember it differently because it's where you grew up.

By the same token, it's hard to know if your first car was any good. Okay, not really. We all know that our first cars actually were shitty and we just remember them as a total hoonmobiles because we were reckless teenagers.

But what if your first car was good? What if you grew up in 2025 and your mom's old Corolla was a genuine performance driving machine? While we were discussing BMW and Toyota's tie-up, we got a fine discussion of why sports cars aren't what we really dream about from Brian1321 and CobraJoe. One line in particular stood out, but the conversation as a whole was great.

Let's face it: when Akio Toyoda became CEO at Toyota, nobody really knew what to make of it.…
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"We are an endangered species, you and I. We lovers of speed. We devotees of power, performance and noise. 'Go away', we are told, 'and take your carbon-fibre and your fire-spitting V12s with you'. There's hardly a place out here for us anymore, not amongst all the commuters and congestion. Not in this growing age of safety and restraint, where practicality trumps adrenalin. Where the ratio of miles to the gallon is championed over horsepower to the weight. The evidence is everywhere. You and I are being squeezed out, pushed aside and hunted down at every hairpin turn.

And yet there is hope. There is a safe haven, a place where we are free to challenge conventions, push the laws of physics and drive our powerful, our beautiful machines hard. It's not a racetrack in Germany or even a highway in Montana.